Home Care Assessment Alberta: What Happens and How to Prepare

How the Assessment Process Starts

Every publicly funded home care arrangement in Alberta begins with a clinical assessment. There's no self-service application form and no way to skip this step — access to provincial home care services requires evaluation by an AHS case manager.

You initiate the process one of two ways:

• Call Health Link 811 and ask to be connected to your zone's Continuing Care Access Centre
• Contact your zone's access centre directly — there's one for each of the five health zones (South, Calgary, Central, Edmonton, North)

A registered nurse or intake coordinator gathers preliminary information: your parent's demographics, current living situation, immediate safety risks, and whether they have an active Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP) card. Intake response is typically within one to seven days depending on triage urgency; ask the access team how soon the assessment can be scheduled.

No physician referral is needed. The parent, a family advocate, or a primary healthcare provider can initiate the request.

What the Case Manager Evaluates

The AHS case manager — usually a registered nurse — visits your parent at home and conducts a standardized assessment using the interRAI Home Care (RAI-HC) instrument. This isn't a casual conversation. The interRAI tool is a clinical evaluation that measures specific domains:

Physical function: Can your parent bathe, dress, eat, use the toilet, and move around the home independently? The assessment scores each activity of daily living individually.

Cognitive performance: The Cognitive Performance Scale (CPS) rates function from 0 (intact) to 6 (very severe impairment). A CPS score of 3 or higher is generally required for specialized dementia care in a Type B Secure Space.

Medical complexity: Medications, chronic conditions, wound care needs, pain management, and the stability of their medical situation.

Environmental risks: Fall hazards in the home, accessibility barriers, whether the parent can safely prepare food, manage medications, and respond to emergencies.

Caregiver stress: Intake considers caregiver burnout, and the MAPLe score assesses the risk of caregiver breakdown. Tell the case manager about the caregiver's support needs because this risk can affect placement priority.

The interRAI tool generates a MAPLe (Method for Assigning Priority Levels) score that predicts the risk of institutionalization and caregiver breakdown. A high or very high MAPLe score designates your parent as an urgent priority for facility-based care.

What to Prepare Before the Visit

The case manager is making clinical judgments during a one-to-two-hour window. The more organized your information, the more accurate the assessment:

• Complete medication list — every prescription, over-the-counter drug, and supplement, with dosages and schedules
• AHCIP card — your parent's Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan card, confirming active coverage
• Primary physician contact details — name, clinic, phone number
• A two-week daily care log — document incidents that show the gap between what your parent needs and what they can do independently: missed medications, falls, unsafe cooking, getting lost, incontinence episodes
• List of current support — what family members are doing now (meals, bathing, transportation), how many hours per week, and whether that level is sustainable

The daily care log is the single most effective preparation tool. Case managers make decisions based on documented patterns, not single incidents. Two weeks of recorded observations gives them concrete evidence to work with.

What Happens After the Assessment

Based on the interRAI results, the case manager assigns your parent to one of several care streams:

Home and community care — professional health services and personal care delivered in the parent's own home. Hours are allocated based on assessed need, and these services are fully funded under AHCIP.

Continuing Care Home Type B (formerly Designated Supportive Living) — for people who are medically stable but need 24-hour on-site personal care support.

Continuing Care Home Type A (formerly Long-Term Care) — for people with complex, unpredictable medical needs requiring continuous registered nurse oversight.

If your parent is approved for home care, the case manager builds a care plan specifying the type and frequency of services. The plan is reassessed annually for home care clients, or quarterly for those in Type A facilities.

If You Disagree With the Assessment

Families sometimes feel the assessment understated their parent's needs — often because the parent presented better during the visit than they do on a typical day (a phenomenon called "showtiming" that's common with early-to-moderate dementia).

Your options:

1. Share your daily care log and specific incident documentation with the case manager
2. Request a reassessment if your parent's condition has changed since the original evaluation
3. Escalate through AHS Patient Relations at 1-855-550-2555 if you believe the assessment was inadequate
4. File a formal concern through the Patient Concerns Resolution Process if needed. The 15-day Citizen's Appeal Panel deadline applies to decisions by a continuing care licensing director or complaints officer, not to an AHS Patient Relations complaint.

The Alberta Care Decision Guide includes an assessment preparation checklist and a daily care tracking log template designed to capture exactly the information case managers use when determining care hours.

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